posts tagged "solitude"

"The only protection
against death
was to love solitude.”
-Brenda Hillman, from “Saguaro"

"And solitude was beautiful
When I was sure that I was strong.
I thought it was a medium
In which to grow, but I was wrong.”
-James Fenton, from “The Possibility"

"There is nothing more terrible, I learned, than having to face the objects of a dead man. Things are inert; they have meaning only in function of the life that makes use of them. When that life ends, the things change, even though they remain the same. They are there and yet not there: tangible ghosts, condemned to survive in a world they no longer belong to. …

…There is a poignancy to it, and also a kind of horror. In themselves, the things mean nothing, like the cooking utensils of some vanished civilization. And yet they say something to us, standing there not as objects but as remnants of thought, of consciousness, emblems of the solitude in which a man comes to make decisions about himself: whether to color his hair, whether to wear this or that shirt, whether to live, whether to die. And the futility of it all once there is death.”

-Paul Auster, “Invention of Solitude"

"Every book, is an image of solitude. […] A man sits alone in a room and writes. Whether the book speaks of loneliness or companionship, it is necessarily a product of solitude.”
-Paul Auster, “Invention of Solitude"